Above Teignmouth is Haldon, that vast expanse of tableland whose heights we first saw from Exmouth, and whose range—marked on maps “Great Haldon” and “Little”—extends across the whole of the back country between Exe and Teign. He who, in search of fresh air and vigour on some stewing day in the Teign valley, essays to climb from Teignmouth to Little Haldon, comes, very soon after he has set out, and very long before he has arrived, to the conclusion that the “littleness” of Little Haldon is a misnomer; for the way is long and the road steep. But once there, you are in another and more bracing climate, where the air is keen and charged with the scent of the bracken and the heather that clothe the wild moorland. From Haldon you look one way to the Exe and the other to the Teign, and, standing in one and the selfsame spot, can see both, for it is an exceeding high place. The solitude of it is perhaps intensified to some by the fact of Teignmouth’s cemetery being here; but it is a large and a populous place, and to those of us who knew in life many who lie here, this is no solitude. God rest them. The summer sun that shines on Haldon shines no more for them, nor winter storms blow.
Although Teignmouth has its literary and artistic associations, it does by no means obtrude them upon the stranger, who, indeed, only discovers them after some considerable pains, and is perhaps regarded as a little eccentric, for his trouble. Two poets—Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and John Keats—have described the town, and although Praed was not actually born here, the connection with the family was close, the Bitton property belonging to his father, who lies in the churchyard of West Teignmouth. Bitton, in fact, only passed from the Praeds in 1863. The poet was born in 1802 and died in 1839, when member of Parliament for Aylesbury.
There are reasons all-sufficient why Teignmouth’s poetic associations should not be flaunted. Too great insistence upon Praed would advertise more fully the brutal vandalism permitted of late years at Bitton, when no finger was stirred to save that lovely wooded riverside park from being cut up and demolished, to build cheap houses upon. Bitton was one of the loveliest places upon the Teign. In the words of Praed himself:
“There beamed upon the river side
A shady dwelling-place
Most beautiful! Upon that spot,
Beside the echoing wave,
A fairy might have built her grot,
An anchorite his grave.
The river with its constant fall